Muller's ratchet
Trinquete de Muller
- Date
- 1932 · confidence high
- Place
- Austin, Texas, United States
- Credited to
- Hermann Joseph Muller
- Field
- Life & health
What was discovered
Evolutionary process by which, in asexual populations lacking recombination, deleterious mutations accumulate irreversibly generation after generation; proposed by Hermann Muller as an argument for the advantage of sexual reproduction.
What it led to
- theories on the evolution of sexual reproduction
- asexual population genetics
- mutational load models
- studies on the extinction of asexual lineages